One of those foo-foo film sites. By Glenn Kenny

August 01, 2014

Two poles of the current cinema

While John Michael McDonagh's Calvary opens with the words of St. Augustine, James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy opens with the sounds of 10cc's "I'm Not In Love." Now 10cc is arguably some kind of art-rock outfit, so maybe the distinction isn't as enormous as what I'm positing here. But it probably is. I liked both movies (guess which one the above image is from!), and review them at RogerEbert.com.

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Definitely not meaning to be any kind of stickler/snotty comic fan by saying the following, especially since that particular sequence of Avengers stories was one of my favorites ever (the death of the Swordsman was the part that got me), and somebody else has probably already mentioned it already: the GOTG were in the midst of their first revival (helmed by Steve Gerber) at the same time the Scarlet Witch was marrying the Vision. But it was the old version of the group, which from what I understand doesn't have much if any connection with this new group at all. Also, I love the news about the yawn - may turn out to be a fluke, maybe a harbinger of some kind of change?

In one of his stories, Rocket Raccoon met Razorback -- a superpowered truck driver from Arkansas who dresses up like a pig. (Both characters were created by the poor Bill Mantlo, incidentally.) Now, a movie starring him I might conceivably be interested in...

Not wanting to hijack a thread, but I don't know where else to post this here - I'm in the midst of the Fire Walk With Me deleted scenes on the Twin Peaks box set. The scene under the ceiling fan instantly went into my Scariest Ever top 10, and I can't believe it didn't make the movie.

I recently reread the mid-1970s Jim Starlin issues of Warlock and Captain Marvel, which feature Thanos, Drax (looking very different from the character in the movie) and Gamora. I've also read those Gerber-written Defenders stories with the Guardians. But, as Grant L says, that was an early version of the group with different characters.

:Geez, when are they gonna make another film for those of us who grew up on Harvey comics?"

Or Charlton or Gold Key?

I was a Marvel addict for about 20 years, but I began to lose interest in the late '80s and I stopped reading their comics entirely in the late '90s. So the last 15 years of Marvel is unexplored territory for me.

Gerber's Man-Thing was my personal favorite, but I liked pretty much everything he wrote in the '70s: Howard, Defenders, Daredevil, even Son of Satan and Tales of the Zombie.

A few years later, something as surreal (and unexplained) as Gerber's "elf with a gun" in Defenders would probably not have been allowed at Marvel. Thank God nobody was supervising the comics in '75 and '76!

I've read that WATCHMEN (the comic book) was going to star the actual Charlton characters, which DC had bought in the mid-1980s. But then DC decided to revive the characters -- Blue Beetle, the Question, Captain Atom, etc. -- in their own comic books. So Moore and Gibbons used thinly disguised versions in WATCHMEN.

Correct: Moore's original proposal for 'Watchman' was a revisionist revival of the Charlton characters, as he had done just a few years earlier for the similarly-defunct superhero 'Marvelman' (whose convoluted legal and publishing history would tax even Ozymandias' intellect, but I digress).